Congolese Movement for Democracy and Integral Development
콩고민주통합발전운동
A liberal party in the Republic of the Congo, founded by Bernard Kolélas with the novelist Sony Lab'ou Tansi, whose statutes were filed in August 1989. It became the second-largest party in the 1992 elections and was linked to the Ninja militia during the civil wars of the 1990s; from 2007 it was allied with Denis Sassou Nguesso's Congolese Party of Labour.
In depth
The party's statutes were deposited at the Ministry of the Interior on 3 August 1989. Kolélas was its candidate in the August 1992 presidential election and came second behind Pascal Lissouba of the Pan-African Union for Social Democracy (UPADS); in that year's parliamentary election the party became the second-largest group and formed the opposition Union for Democratic Renewal (URD) in the National Assembly. In 1995 the deputy Didier Sengha left, accusing Kolélas of running the party autocratically, and founded a new party.
As violence between government and opposition after the 1993 election turned into civil war, the party was linked to the Ninja militia. When fighting between the Cobra and Cocoye militias broke out again in 1997, Lissouba appointed Kolélas prime minister of a government of national unity that September, but an offensive by Angolan forces and the Cobra militias ousted both men and returned the presidency to Sassou Nguesso. The party did not take part in the 2002 elections and its members were arrested, imprisoned or killed; Kolélas, sentenced to death in absentia in 2000, could return only in 2005, after which an amnesty allowed him to re-establish the party.
On 24 April 2007 the party formed an electoral alliance with Sassou Nguesso's Congolese Party of Labour (PCT) and won 11 of 137 seats in that year's election. After Kolélas died in November 2009 his son Guy Brice Parfait Kolélas became interim president, but he left in 2017 after a falling out with his brother Euloge Landry Kolélas, under whose leadership the party stayed in government.